Giving An Allowance Patented: Acacia Sues Apple

from the giving-allowance-isn't-prior-art? dept

Acacia is a well known patent hoarder, who buys up or licenses various unused patents and sets up subsidiaries who do nothing but sue companies in the market who actually make products. The latest Acacia lawsuit has been filed against Apple for the "allowance" feature in iTunes that allows someone to transfer a dollar amount of iTunes credit to someone else -- effectively allowing a parent with a credit card to issue some "allowance" for a kid to purchase iTunes. You would think that such a concept wouldn't be patentable, given the history of parents giving kids an allowance -- but apparently the folks working in the patent office never received allowances as kids. The patent itself seems rather straightforward, but it's difficult to understand why such a thing is patentable in the first place. In the Teleflex v. KSR ruling the Supreme Court noted that the patent office shouldn't just approve patents on combining obvious ideas. Mixing the internet with allowances would seem to fall into that camp, though this patent was issued prior to the Supreme Court ruling.

Re:

We need some checks and balances.. how about a supreme court for patents. They would be totally separate from the patent office and would only have the power to instantly revoke patents.

Well, we already have CAFC, which is effectively a court for patent disputes... and the opposite occurred. Because it's focused on patents, former patent attorneys were appointed to it, and there's nothing most patent attorneys like more than more patents...

Patent court

Yeah, it's like tax court, which is effectively ran by the IRS. It needs, instead, to be set up in some fashion that is somewhat adversarial... like the executive/legislative/judicial branches of government.

prior art

A long long time ago ( one hundred years ), one of my forebears was a ne're do well whose parents sent money to a bank account far far away (six thousand miles) for him to go and live on when they decided to get rid of him. What difference between them depositing money to a foreign bank account to be drawn on by their son and me depositing money to an iTunes account to be drawn on by my son?

Re: Re: prior art

"Why it's only the little crooks you always worry about, Joe?"

Oh yes, Acacia is a "small" crook. Poor little guys, defending years of effort and research that went into their patents..

Would you like to provide proof for IBM being a patent troll? They create a lot of patents through *gasp* actual research. IBM also has many patents that it doesn't use to use the crap out of other companies. While some of their patent litigation is questionable, they do have a lot of other positives to counterbalance at least, what does Acacia have?

Re: Re: prior art

Why it's only the little crooks you always worry about, Joe?

A troll is a troll. I worry about them all. Litigation by Lotus (albeit based on copyright law) held back the competitive market place for spreadsheets for years. When Techdirt publishes an example of this type of shakedown by IBM, I will be happy to advocate imprisonment for their executives.

I do think that the current state of the law has created an environment where companies like IBM are forced to file a patent as a defensive measure every time one of their scientists has a bowel movement.

I do not want to feed your paranoia but you might think on the fact that we send people to jail for years for robbing a grocery store but no one from Wall Street has gone to jail for the sub-prime mess which involves six to eight orders of magnitude more money.

In other words what IBM proposes to startups is this:
give us unrestricted license to all of your patents AND $25,000+ and we promise not to sue you for possible violation of one of our 40,000 junk patents...

Simple solution..

There is quite a simple solution to all these ridiculous patent/copyright lawsuits; have the plaintiff liable for the defendants lawyer fees, court fees and any damages brought on by the plaintiffs lawsuit if they lose. I’m sure a lot of these ridiculous lawsuits would come to a screeching halt and make people think twice before filing a ridiculous claim. The only people that would follow up and go all the way with them, are those that are actually being cheated and have a legit product for the patent/copyright.

Re: Simple solution..

All of those patent lawsuits are filed by corporations, usually LLCs or, in case of Acacia, it's a relatively large publicly-traded corporation

Corporations and LLCs shield executives from personal liabilities
Otherwise you would see a LOT of those crooked CEOs of large corporations kicked out of their mansions or worse, in jail

I say go and do it dude
I will gladly sacrifice my only patent for the benefit of humanity - just to see some of those CEO bastards follow Dennis Kozlovski path

And BTW what you are proposing will directly lead to domination of a few largest market players
patent lawsuit is a total crapshoot in the US, even with the perfectly valid patent
Only the largest players can afford to absorb possible losses